Here we are- the final task for ETEC540. What an interesting journey it’s been. I’m quite sad that this will be the final weekly task but I hope you will enjoy my final contribution. For my speculative futures narratives, I created a Visual story/ game in Twine called The Interview.

There will be at least one character (maybe two depending on how you look at it) that we are all familiar with and that I don’t think needs much of a bio although we do get glimpses into how their life has changed over time. I don’t want to give too much away! The other characters are purely fictional but represent students like us that participated in this course, we get to catch up with them much later in life. To access the story/ game please click on The Interview.

Hmmm… so a little context for the micro-blog above. I was scheduled to get married at the start of April. Alas, that had to be cancelled or hopefully only postponed as a result of the Covid pandemic. In the last few weeks, my partner and I discussed skipping the actual celebrations and just getting the paper work done. This is thus an imaginary message to my parents telling them that I’m sorry that they will miss the hypothetical day (they are not allowed to travel). I didn’t actually intend for the message to be this one though, I really wanted to start by saying that, “this is not my idea of a holiday” but the word holiday didn’t appear as an option with the predictive text. I then just went with the word “formal” and this is the message that flowed out of that initial choice. Even before beginning the task, I was thinking of how different this task might be to the speech to text and manual script tasks. For some reason, I kept on circling back to the idea of how much writing has changed over the centuries. More about that later though…

The entire micro-blog seems clunky in the way it was put together with words being used rather oddly and sentence construction also seeming strange. That is entirely due to the silly options the predictive text offers at times. Just take a look at the screenshot below… I live in South Africa, why on earth would I want to reference Washington? It doesn’t even make any sense in terms of the sentences already constructed in the message.

The micro-blog reads a bit like as if someone with a rather basic grasp of English wrote this message and as such I can’t say I’ve seen similar statements in any other textual products that would be considered mainstream media or even scholarly. It did remind me of the spam emails I get informing me of the millions I’ve inherited but this is probably not the place to get into that. The text is different in several ways from how I would have normally expressed myself, for one- I wouldn’t have typed this message in English but would have used my first language. On that point, I was super excited to see one or two words from my mother tongue be included in the predictive text options. It’s rather funny to think I would go “weekend” after just saying sorry for something in this text. Again, this was a rather silly option provided by the algorithm given the sentences already constructed. Can the algorithm not recognize the contexts in which certain words might be used?

Enough about the message here though and back to considering the changing landscape of written text through the use of algorithms. Where literacy was once a domain for only a privileged few, this kind of predictive text algorithm almost allows anyone to assemble a semi-coherent message in a language they might not even know. To test this theory, I conducted a little experiment. I removed the English keyboard on my phone, added an Italian keyboard and went back to my messaging app and repeated our micro-blog task. This time without knowing what the words were that I was picking. Here is the translated result. Can I declare myself fluent in Italian now? 😀

Probably not… But I do wonder about what affordances are lost when the user has to input less and less of their own thoughts and creativity in the message they are constructing. Isn’t that something that many of us agreed upon when we reflected on the speech to text task- that there was more thought that went into the story and words we wanted to weave together in our stories if we were given the chance to type it vs. just narrating it? Is this a similar situation for predictive text? Not quite, but there does seem to be a similar feeling attached to making use of predictive text. I did feel as if I lost a little of my own voice in this message, I felt limited by the technology in what I wanted to say and how I wanted to express myself.

I don’t like the idea that an algorithm is deciding for me what the message is I am constructing. It feels controlling and steals from me the opportunity to be an individual. Someone somewhere has decided for me that I should be using the word “Washington” in my messages where I probably have only used it a handful of times in my entire life. Where are the words that I would have liked to use? The ones I love and regularly make use of… Until algorithms can be more ethical and less biased towards further privileging those part of the societies that have constructed them will they be of little use to help contribute towards a more equitable society or education system. Their biases (small and large) robs us of our individuality and tries to conform us to some inputted standard. The algorithms are of course not to blame, it is the designers of those algorithms and the data used to construct their biases that reflect the underlying problems still present in our societies.

It was Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, who first articulated the concept of the Attention Economy when he proclaimed that, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. This topic reminded me of a poem I came across in another ETEC module that so aptly illustrated the idea of how our attention is being diverted to activities that see a change in the very behavior we use to define human existence.

Our daily lives are now so intertwined with the devices we use that we spend on average a third of our waking hours engaged with mobile technology alone. With the millions of apps out there it is not surprising that so many different techniques have been developed to try and fight to keep our attention. I think what the task this week highlighted so well for me though was exactly how accustomed (or is the correct word really “trained”) I’ve become to these embedded features or design elements. By employing an alternate design, the game we were tasked to play purposefully had me recognize what I am typically used to engaging with on these interfaces. The task also gave rise to a pretty strong emotional response. I became increasingly frustrated and even anxious by not being able to complete the tasks required of me in a timely manner. Everything took a second try or even a third before I got it right and was able to move on to the next screen.

Right on the very first page, I had to remove the filled in text before adding in my details to “register”, I had to Google a Cyrillic letter to add to my password, match letters to my email address, use annoying drop down lists for the domain name and go into the terms and conditions to accept them. The deathly slow scrolling rate to go through the terms and conditions along with the ticking clock and pop up window reminding me that time is a limited resource was the beginning of my anxiety-filled experience. On top of that it took me some time to figure out that to progress I had to click on next which was placed rather oddly on the left hand side of the window (as opposed to a more natural central or right orientated position which would be in-line with the convention I am used to).

Window after window came filled with similar annoyances (why have an age scale that goes to 200? Who lives that long?). I even wanted to ask the chat bot for help- a cheat for the game… I was naive but hopeful (okay, maybe a little desperate). Whatever I typed ended up being complete gibberish. Another time, it told me to wait because there were 430 people in line. I came to accept that I was truly alone.

I made it in the end but ended up feeling a little emotionally drained thereafter. I was overstimulated and felt exhausted by the amount of effort I had to put in to progress between the screens.

What I take from the experience of playing this game was the impact that digital interactions have on me. The very design of a website clearly has the ability to affect me emotionally whether positive or not. I think this disillusioned me from the idea that these spaces are neutral ground in some way. They contain a lot of elements that have been purposefully used to elicit some kind of response in me (whether that is for my benefit or theirs). Is there an alternative though? On the site for the Center for Humane Technology (spearheaded by Tristan Harris), there is a suggested design framework for developers to help them take into account six human sensitivities to counter strong responses elicited through the interaction with technology in order to create more balanced/ neutral spaces. Take a look at the snapshot below of this framework.

To conclude, I watched a talk this week by an expert in XR data privacy and it seems that so many concerns that were highlighted in this week’s module regarding data collected and the design of social media apps/ websites to manipulate our behavior is being transferred into the Virtual and Augmented reality spaces too. Just take a look at this article to gain some insight on this. I’m afraid that these are problems that simply cannot be ignored and will require each of us to educate ourselves on design practices being used to manipulate our attention, demand more transparency from tech. companies on how they operate and to pressure governments to institute and uphold laws that will see more protection of our rights and information.

The experience of completing the task this week was the polar opposite of Task 8’s for me, which was strange as these two tasks are really inextricably linked. As I worked through the module’s theory component, I suddenly felt at home with words such as “matrices” being used. As a science graduate, mathematics feels very much like a safe space and a tool I can rely on to help reveal the truth about relationships in data. Or can it?

It was with much enthusiasm that I opened the data set sent by Ernesto in Palladio. I was fascinated by all the facets and groupings available to toggle and filter the visualized networks with. Just a few seconds were needed each time to reveal a new and unexpected connected network between the musical tracks, curators and groupings. Each one calling out for careful further inspection to make sense of the interesting visuals taking over my screen. It also meant a lot of crosschecking with fellow curators’ posts on the reasons for their track selection to paint a richer story of the networks panned out in front of me.

The very first network I’d like to share was one created with just myself and Kristin’s track choices. Even though I had read over her post last weekend describing her curation, I was very surprised to see that we in fact had picked nine identical songs (you might be wondering whether we were comparing notes on the sly during our selection process but I can guarantee you that we weren’t). Judging our song selection solely by the visualization of this network though would tempt one to think that our analysis and curation of the songs must have been based on similar criteria.

I distinctly remembered though that Kristin had followed a meticulously thought out process in the way that she selected her songs. She eliminated songs that had similar sounds from her list and she tried to represent the different continents in a more equitable way. In contrast, my own criteria for song selection was based solely on a song being able to evoke some kind of emotion in me. Vastly different approaches resulted in almost identical song selections. This was fascinating to me and highlighted the risk associated in interpreting data without considering the context from which that data came. A first glance of the connected network formed between Kristin and my selections would have rightly led one to conclude that we placed emphasis on similar songs but it does not reveal in any way the reasoning behind that selection and emphasis (which could only be gleaned from our blog posts). Fascinatingly, this bias could also be confirmed with the network graph created between Daniella’s track choices and my own. Like me, she also chose tracks solely based on emotional reactions but in this case, we only shared three identical track choices.

The other graph I wanted to show-case was a multiplex network created between the most popular track curated (Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony) and one of the least popular tracks (the panpipes track from the Solomon Islands). Only two curators had selected both of these tracks (Rebecca and Sukhjeevan) thus signifying the critical role they play in connecting these two networks. In contrast, the track I rated as my favorite (5^th symphony) and least favorite (Johnny B. Goode) had a multitude of curators that had selected both songs.

I also wanted to look at the network formed between the eight classical tracks of the Golden Record and the choices in curation within my group since many of us had commented on there being too many such tracks perhaps included on the Golden Record. This revealed that the 5^th symphony was the most popular choice of classical song and on average most curators in my group had selected two classical pieces with the most popular combination being this track with the Magic Flute track. Most interestingly though, the three curators to have only selected one classical track (Brian, Rebecca and Alexandra) had all picked the 5^th symphony to form part of their curation. I think this says something about how pervasive the 5^th symphony in fact is in terms of its reputation as a true piece of musical mastery but again this might just be my interpretation.

I think this exercise was useful in revealing interesting similarities in the choices made among all the curators in their selection of songs. However, it’s also very clear that one has to be careful in reading too much into the choices made as the reasons for selection can clearly be vastly different, which adds a different dimension to how one views these networks.

“Epic album of all time”?

Honestly, I disliked completing the task this week and wish it was an optional one as opposed to a mandatory one. Initially, I was very excited to learn what songs were included on the record that was sent out into the universe to represent earth and the life it contains. It started pretty well with the first few tracks on the playlist we were given, a wedding song from Peru and Muğam titled as Ugam on the playlist (the Azerbaijan bagpipes song). Then came the composition by Bach (completely okay with this at first although I did wonder why specifically this song was included since I thought there were more well-known classical pieces out there). Upon listening to the podcast episode and reading a little more about the songs that were included on the record, I came to understand that Bach pieces contain a large amount of mathematical operations, which I then rationalized, was the reason for including this particular piece. As I continued with the playlist, I became increasingly dismayed to learn that not just one but THREE Bach pieces were included on the 27 track record. Added to this was a piece by Mozart and also two tracks by Beethoven. There are eight classical pieces then in total if you also include the piece by Stravinsky and the Frairie Round. Add in a further two popular US songs and we now have more than a third of the record representing the Western world alone. Many of the largest nations on earth had but a single song each representing them on the record e.g. India and China.

I guess it being an American project, it would have made sense to include so many western musical artifacts but then the project does not match the criteria set out by Tim Ferris when he stated that they wanted music from all around the world represented, as “music is a good way to memorialize the human species”. The module’s reading this week seems echoed in this task. Just as it’s naive according to Apple (1988) to think of school curricula as neutral knowledge so too is it naive to have thought that this project would equitably represent so many nations and cultures. I would really like to know though what kind of input the various nations across the world were allowed to give in this project or whether they were consulted on any of the songs meant to represent them.

Although I understand that there were physical limits to how many songs and sounds could be included on the record, I feel let down by the choices the committee in charge of this project made. Even some of the 55 languages used for the greetings didn’t make sense to me e.g. Sesotho but not Swahili is on the list even though there are almost three times as many speakers of Swahili than Sesotho on the African continent? Then there is also the small matter of the UN president at the time included in the recordings. Kurt Waldheim (that made the opening address) had hid the extent of his involvement in Nazi war crimes over the years and in general just simply wasn’t a very nice person.

Since I didn’t feel the tracks were truly representative of the world’s nations and cultures, I decided to not try and curate the songs based on that criteria. I simply listened to the tracks and those that evoked some kind of emotion in me were the ones I ended up putting together into a playlist. It was apparently Plato that said “music has a direct effect on the soul” and it was those kinds of songs I sought out from the list given. I arranged them so that the ones I liked the most would appear first in the playlist. Beethoven is ranked highest as listening to the music evoked strong memories from my childhood. On a lighter note- my first exposure to classical music came from watching a kid’s show in the 90’s called the Mozart Band. Having tried to find a video clip of the show I found out it was actually a Spanish cartoon animated by a Taiwanese company that was then dubbed into other languages and distributed. Notably, Bach is absent from this group of young geniuses.

Playlist

(the titles below are as they appear on the NASA site)

1. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor.

2. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow.

3. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle (it was originally thought that this song was recorded in Senegal but it turns out it was actually recorded in Benin).

4. Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska.

5. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar.

6. Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen.

7. Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes.

8. Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México.

9. Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor.

10. “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry.

Reference

Apple, M. W. (1988). What reform talk does: Creating new inequalities in education. Educational Administration Quarterly, 24(3), 272-281.

McDonald, L. (Host). (2019). Voyager Golden Record. In Twenty Thousand Hertz. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

This has been by far the most challenging task to complete for me yet. I imagine this is because the two mediums I used for Task 1 (visual and written text) are in my comfort zone when it comes to communication. I had taken a photo of my work bag’s contents and incorporated numbered icons you could click on for more information on the items found in my bag. Below is a reminder of the picture I used.

It was challenging to decide this week how I would redesign the submission and it took me some time to develop an idea of what I wanted to do. One of my initial ideas to transform the task included recording the names of the items in my first language as voice notes and having my classmates assign the words to what they thought each item’s name was. I then reasoned that it wouldn’t be very obvious at all for them to do and so the next idea I explored was to find the internet slang (urban lingo) of the items I had in my bag in some way. Since I didn’t know some of the common slang words used for the items in my bag, I had to turn to the internet to search for them and it was during this process that I concluded that both my ideas thus far weren’t really matching the brief of the task.

The idea I most would have liked to explore would have been to create a mashup song of popular or known songs associated for me with the different items. Mashups (to me) are wonderfully creative pieces of work and I have fond memories of listening to some that combined either the year’s most popular songs or some of my most loved songs. Alas, when I looked into what the process would be like to deliver a mashup I got quite scared. I needed to find acoustic tracks of the songs to overlay with the originals and additionally would have to guess the bpm (beats per minute) of each song. As someone that likes to listen to music but has received no musical training, I just didn’t think I would be able to do this in the few days available this week.

I then started thinking about examples of mainstream media I’ve come across that used alternative ways of communication than what would normally be associated with that particular medium. Examples like Mr. Bean and old-school radio serials came to mind. This gave me the confidence to try my hand at creating my own version of such a media artifact. A small amount of written text is used as an intro in my amateur radio-serial type artifact with the idea being that you as a listener will be able to identify the objects by the sound effects created as the different items in my bag are being used (the aural component). Alternatively, listeners might infer meaning by that what you hear me say given the context that the item is being used in (a verbal component).

Below is the video of my sound project. Don’t worry it isn’t really much of a video as you’ll soon see that the two lines of text included in the clip really don’t give anything away. The story is painted solely through the items and the sounds associated with them along with the context my voice hopefully provides as clues to what they are (the natural habitat that they are used in). I haven’t included all the items from my original bag (I wondered throughout this task why I had picked such a boring bag) but you might want to tick off the items you can identify from the list given below the video. Once you submit your answers, you should be able to see how many you got right (totally optional).

The purpose of Task 1 was for us to get to know each other through the exploration of the items we hold in our bags. What do these items “say” about us? Now that you have identified the items I have in my bag through the radio-serial type artifact above, you should have also formed some opinions on me by now. You should have picked up that I am an educator that spends time balancing written texts (my notebooks and textbooks) with the digital (e.g. emails on a laptop and drawing pad) along with verbal communication either in person (greeting my colleagues) or digitally (my Skype meeting). At least, I hope some of that information could be picked up on as you listened to my artifact. 🙂 The New London Group’s description of how people create through hybridization seems applicable to me too as I constantly blend digital and analogue communications (written and verbal) in my work.

The second video included here are for those that have a burning desire to know exactly which items are responsible for which sounds. To be clear- this isn’t the intended artifact for the task submission and I only included it for those that might really want to link the sounds with the items.

Reference

The New London Group. (1999;1996;). A pedagogy of multiliteracies designing social futures. (pp. 19-46). Cambridge: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203979402-6